Loose ends.

And…I am back. The Stones were great. I put off updating here until the column I wrote about it was published, as it is pretty much all I have to say about it, except for maybe this:

Leaving a football stadium with 30,000 other people the same week that Michigan led the nation in new Covid cases did not feel good. I had a mask on, but my friend kept muttering “CovidflumeCovidflumeCovidflume” behind me, and I fear he was right. I guess now we test the power of the ol’ booster.

I’ve never been to a Lions game. I was in Ford Field once before, to do an interview with someone who had an office there. Modern stadiums — stadia? — are marvels, especially if you’ve ever watched a Green Bay Packers game, or remember that Bengals-Chargers (? I think it was them) Freezer Bowl at Riverfront Stadium in 1980-whenever. Climate control is a miracle. I hope all those high ceilings kept the air moving, because: See previous paragraph.

Tuesday I and the Birthday Twins went to dinner at a local tapas bar, and Kate updated us on the exciting life of a rock musician/sound engineer. At the Seattle show, which was a festival scattered around multiple small clubs over three days, she walked into the green room and saw Michael Imperioli sitting there. Seems Christufuh has a band. They did not speak. Then they flew home on Delta instead of Spirit — “They give you a free cookie!” — and in another couple of days she’ll be freezing her ass off, doing live sound for the holiday tree lighting downtown. Living the dream.

It’s been a week. Next week will be bigger.

In the meantime, as we wait to watch the jury acquit Kyle Rittenhouse, let’s be grateful that as fucked-up as this country is at the moment, we can still despise Paul Gosar as one.

Good weekend, all. I’m off to pick out my turkey.

Random France photo: Used camera shop.

Posted at 11:01 am in Popculch |
 

64 responses to “Loose ends.”

  1. LAMary said on November 18, 2021 at 11:57 am

    Merch roadie son is in Omaha with Trans Siberian Orchestra. It’s a long haul tour, many stops and he’s not home until January 2. While he usually finds my amusement with weird names Chinese manufacturers use (Amazon is a great source of these..Sidefeel nightgowns is a fave of mine) irritating, he liked the name of the company I ordered some plastic mailing envelopes from: Fuxury. All you people who are getting the scarves I’m crocheting.. that’s a Fuxury envelope. Enjoy.

    476 chars

  2. Jeff Borden said on November 18, 2021 at 11:59 am

    It didn’t escape my notice the two pariah House Republicans –Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois– were the only members of the GOP to vote for censure. Kevin McCarthy, the worthless tool who may well be your next House speaker if polls and trends are correct, decried the censure as a partisan attack. The Republican Party has always been a little scary, but these days it is nothing short of terror inducing. This is a party driven solely by anger, hate, ignorance, fear and white nationalism. Dog help us when they regain power.

    549 chars

  3. Suzanne said on November 18, 2021 at 12:06 pm

    Alarming beyond belief, Jeff.

    I ran across this today
    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/desantis-spokesperson-georgia-vaccine-passport-rothschilds-anti-semitism-conspiracy-theories.html

    And we foolishly thought the Nazis had been defeated.

    Great article on the Stones concert!

    286 chars

  4. David C said on November 18, 2021 at 12:55 pm

    I found out this morning that my grand-supervisor has Covid. I went into the office Monday and talked to him. They say he isn’t vaccinated. If that the case, he was supposed to be masked. He wasn’t. So I’m in quarantine. I’m waiting for a call from the health and safety department to tell me how long. I’m vaccinated and boosted so there’s that. Goddamn, I’m so sick of this shit.

    381 chars

  5. Bob (not Greene) said on November 18, 2021 at 1:08 pm

    Haven’t seen the Rolling Stones, but there’s speculation that they may be playing a “secret” show at a small club tonight in Berwyn, IL. The Stones don’t have another show until Saturday. The club, a roots-rock institution called FitzGerald’s, announced a few weeeks ago on Facebook that they were selling tickets to the secret show and they sold out within minutes, with all of the attendant speculation. I’ll let you know if it happens or if it’s all just bullshit.

    While I’m pretty sure everyone I work with in the office is vaccinated (and several of us have been boostered) we just implemented a written policy stating that if you come into the office you must show proof of vaccination. This was after a vaccinated employee who works in another part of the building came down with a breakthrough case.

    Nancy, good luck to Kate on her young career in the music biz. I have a friend who is a sound/lighting engineer who was the lighting engineer/designer for Leonard Cohen before he died. He’s also a drummer who has played in a number of bands, most recently Poi Dog Pondering, so that’s my brush with greatness, I guess.

    1128 chars

  6. basset said on November 18, 2021 at 1:54 pm

    “Dried-apple wrinkles,” good one… we missed the Stones when they were in Nashville on this tour, I mainly wanted to remember em they way they were at IU Assembly Hall in 1975.

    So how’d Kate like the show?

    I could spend hours in that camera store.

    254 chars

  7. David C said on November 18, 2021 at 2:22 pm

    Corporate employees have to be vaccinated or test weekly and are pretty much required to work in person. I work for Defense division which has a loosely enforced mask requirement for non-vaccinated employees. I just started working at the office one day per week because our director asked us to – not anymore. If my test comes back positive, I’m going to raise hell.

    367 chars

  8. Sherri said on November 18, 2021 at 2:36 pm

    The latest on the Kroenke-St Louis lawsuit, which also involves the rest of the NFL owners.

    https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Daily/Issues/2021/11/18/Franchises/Rams.aspx

    177 chars

  9. Ann said on November 18, 2021 at 3:05 pm

    Fitzgerald’s (do I remember correctly that a certain punctuation mark is forbidden here?). I love that place and it would be a perfect venue for a secret show. Too bad I now live 400 miles instead of four blocks away.

    Great review of the show, too. Especially the line about ants on a dinner plate.

    302 chars

  10. JodiP said on November 18, 2021 at 3:41 pm

    My county employer, announced yesterday that they will require everyone to get vaccinated–thus far, you could remain unvaccinated but had to get tested weekly. The do reference to the extent the law allows, so we presume valid medical and religious objections. All my people are vaxxed. A couple of my peers have folks who aren’t and all of a sudden one of them found religion after spouting anti-vaxx crap for months. It’s not a supervisor’s job to manage it, but they hear about it from the employees. The employee just needs to deal with HR now and begin arranging their shots if they choose to. The deadline to be fully vaxxed is 2/04/2022. Our cases are high in MN, overwhelming our rural hospitals. Many also end up in the metro of course.

    746 chars

  11. David C said on November 18, 2021 at 4:29 pm

    They need to empanel a group of priests, pastors, rabbis, imams, lamas, and whatever to quiz the conveniently religious on the basis of their holy newfound vaccination objections.

    179 chars

  12. Deborah said on November 18, 2021 at 5:23 pm

    Sunday my husband found out that his granddaughter, her dad and the dad’s girlfriend (the mother, my husband’s daughter lives in another state) all had covid and were quarantining for the last 2 weeks. My husband calls his granddaughter every other sunday so it all happened between calls. The granddaughter had a very mild case, stuffy nose and tired for a day and a half, the others had a bit more discomfort. The adults were fully vaxed but the 14 year old granddaughter was not for some reason. Disconcerting. They think it came from the granddaughter’s school, no word on whether there was a mask mandate or not. My husband is trying not to stigmatize his granddaughter by asking her a lot of questions, the poor kid has a lot on her plate with her mother taking off.

    I’m going to go back now and read Nancy’s Stones article.

    833 chars

  13. David C said on November 18, 2021 at 5:53 pm

    I got tested. Quick test was negative. The not so quick test I find out about tomorrow or Monday. They said the quick test is 85% accurate. So I’m not so concerned any more. I think I was getting psychosomatic symptoms before the test.

    235 chars

  14. LAMary said on November 18, 2021 at 6:51 pm

    Dexter, this is the car air freshner you need: https://tinyurl.com/fcjz6zf9

    76 chars

  15. Dexter Friend said on November 19, 2021 at 3:13 am

    Dorothy:

    She could look at Mount Carmel Grove City which I
    think would be her best option, or Ohio Health on Stringtown Road. I will keep my eyes open.

    Vanessa

    168 chars

  16. Dexter Friend said on November 19, 2021 at 3:29 am

    As a sports devotee I have used stadii as the correct plural, then was dissuaded from being so pretentious and began writing stadiums.
    I used to have a blast at the old Pontiac Silverdome when “Wayne-O” Fontes was the coach and Mouse Davis coached the “run and shoot” offense with QB Scott Mitchell. I have never been in Ford Field.

    335 chars

  17. ROGirl said on November 19, 2021 at 5:20 am

    RE: anti-semitism conspiracy theories

    Someone at work who is very trumpy (and emigrated from a part of the world where conspiracy thinking is very strong) said to me she thought that Jews smear blood on the wall at Passover. I told her that’s disgusting, and she just shrugged.

    280 chars

  18. Deborah said on November 19, 2021 at 5:54 am

    Nancy, the Stones piece was great. My husband greatly enjoyed it too.

    Sherri, I didn’t understand much of what is going on in the Kroenke article.

    151 chars

  19. Dexter Friend said on November 19, 2021 at 6:20 am

    Steve Jordan is the drummer now. He collaborates with Don Was also.

    67 chars

  20. alex said on November 19, 2021 at 7:05 am

    One of our local news stations is bending over backwards to kiss Trumpers’ asses and is fear-mongering about local hospitals’ vaccine mandates for workers, predicting mass walkouts and all kinds of chaos.

    I’m frankly appalled that anyone working in health care would be too stupid to be vaccinated at this point. The sort of person who’s belligerent enough to quit their job over it is just the sort I wouldn’t trust having anything to do with my health care. I consider it a good thing if there’s a mass exodus of such idiots. Bring it on.

    543 chars

  21. Jeff Gill said on November 19, 2021 at 7:24 am

    Let me guess, Alex: Sinclair Media owned station?

    49 chars

  22. nancy said on November 19, 2021 at 8:41 am

    The vax refusers who really chap my ass are the police. Around here, they’re PSOs, so they do EMT and fire work, too. I realize CPR breathing is done with a bag now, but that’s just who I don’t want huffing and puffing over my, or anyone’s prone form, doing chest compressions — a COVID-infected cop. Protect and serve, pfft.

    333 chars

  23. Mark P said on November 19, 2021 at 8:43 am

    The company I worked for, and still do occasional work for from home, is a defense contractor. As such, they fall under the federal vax mandate. I was disappointed to read in an email chain that one of the employees I know was concerned and apparently trying for a religious exemption. I had expected better. They are all intelligent, educated people. But they are from Alabama, so there is that.

    Our vet, who had been allowing clients into the building, recently went back to making the humans wait in their cars while the pets go inside.

    None of these people is smart enough, or conscious enough, to understand that if everyone had just worn a mask, social distanced, and got the damned vaccine when they could, the pandemic would be over in the US now.

    Our country is filled with utter morons. Not every one of them is a Republican, but every Republican is one of them.

    882 chars

  24. Suzanne said on November 19, 2021 at 9:14 am

    Here is what Alex mentioned. By all means, answer the survey. I saw it on Facebook and the comments were what you’d expect from this area “Vaccines? But ma freedumb!”

    https://www.wane.com/community/health/coronavirus/fort-wayne-hospitals-could-face-mass-exodus-of-staff-over-vaccine-mandate/

    300 chars

  25. LAMary said on November 19, 2021 at 9:45 am

    I talk to job applicants all over the country all day every day. Lots of them in Texas. Since every health care company has some relationship with Medicare, a federal program, all employees are required to be vaccinated. I ask the “are you vaccinated or willing to be vaccinated” question many times every day and get mostly good replies but there are always a few who say no and no. I haven’t had anyone get nasty with me yet but it will probably happen. Mostly they are just disappointed. Most of the jobs I’m recruiting for pay very well. You want to make six figures? Roll up the sleeve.

    591 chars

  26. Bob (not Greene) said on November 19, 2021 at 10:18 am

    UPDATE: Well, it was bullshit. Lol.

    35 chars

  27. Heather said on November 19, 2021 at 10:50 am

    I also loved your Stones review, Nancy. I wanted to go see them the last time around but the tickets were really pricey. I would have paid $100 but they were at least twice that.

    Also, from the last thread, sorry to hear about Alex’s mom and sending good vibes for whatever lies ahead. It sounds like she is facing the future with grace and courage.

    Not human cancer, but I mentioned a while ago my cat was undergoing surgery–they thought it was a tumor in her spleen but when they got in there it was in the pancreas, which is worse. The good news is that it was a “well-differentiated” tumor and she survived the surgery, which apparently doesn’t always happen, and she’s healed up well and seems back to her normal happy self. (Apparently most cats die within a month of diagnosis, and the surgery was a month ago.) I’m hopeful they caught it early. But as the oncologist said, with pancreatic cancer, the odds are against her. So now I’m looking at treatment–the medication itself isn’t expensive but it requires monthly testing to monitor how she is tolerating it, which would be $$$. But her prognosis with the drug is so good (could be a couple of years instead of a few months), I’m inclined to do it, even though it is a new tier of crazy cat lady for me. But she really is a special cat, and I don’t have kids, work is going really well, etc. etc. Am I crazy to do this?

    1384 chars

  28. Jenine said on November 19, 2021 at 11:26 am

    @Heather: I’m glad your cat is on the right side of that surgery and acting well. You’ll need to look at your budget before going down that $$$ medication route. Vet medicine is so advanced these days that we pet owners have to have a bottom line in mind before we go in for a consultation: price and also the animal’s comfort, considering what’s required for treatment.

    370 chars

  29. Deborah said on November 19, 2021 at 12:05 pm

    Tomorrow we leave for NM, flying out of MDW at 8am. I’m hoping we don’t encounter any unruly fellow passengers and that everyone wears their masks. I saw a chart today that shows an ungodly number of unruly passenger incidents this year, mostly starting with mask refusals then escalating. Yikes. We got our Southwest boarding passes and they indicate that we are indeed in preCheck again so that’s good.

    We will be traveling again in January to So Cal to see my husband’s granddaughter, but we’ll be driving. LB will go with us to see a friend who has been working in LA at a hospital there. Hope everyone stays healthy.

    625 chars

  30. dull_old_man said on November 19, 2021 at 12:12 pm

    Dexter,

    I am a recovering Latin student. The plural of stadium, a neuter noun, would be stadia. Radius, say, is a masculine noun; its (nominative) plural is radii. This is what I will be saying to myself as I head down the halls in the Alzheimer’s unit.

    256 chars

  31. alex said on November 19, 2021 at 1:14 pm

    Rittenhouse acquitted. This time the crying looked real.

    56 chars

  32. brian stouder said on November 19, 2021 at 1:28 pm

    Wow.

    I mean – …….. wow

    31 chars

  33. ROGirl said on November 19, 2021 at 1:45 pm

    I was expecting a not guilty verdict, but a lot sooner — like the same day the jury started deliberating.

    106 chars

  34. Julie Robinson said on November 19, 2021 at 2:22 pm

    No surprise there, nor that Matt Gaetz is offering him an internship in his Congressional office. I shudder to think of the level of crazy this will release.

    157 chars

  35. jcburns said on November 19, 2021 at 2:24 pm

    Happy birthday Deb. I’m glad you and Mike don’t have to get anywhere near Kenosha today.

    88 chars

  36. brian stouder said on November 19, 2021 at 2:46 pm

    ….and on this date, 158 years ago, our greatest president delivered an address at the sight of a horrendous battle (over much the same issue), and he noted that the world would little note, and then forget what they said there….and I think he was more right than I’d otherwise like to think

    295 chars

  37. Sherri said on November 19, 2021 at 3:13 pm

    If only the people who say “All lives matter” actually believed that.

    Deborah, what’s going on in the Kroenke case is this: St Louis has sued the NFL and all the owners, as well as Kroenke, claiming the NFL didn’t follow their established procedure for franchise relocation. In order to get the votes from the other owners to approve his relocation, Kroenke made some promises about covering legal costs in the event the other owners were sued. Now, the legal costs are mounting, several prominent owners have had to submit personal information about their franchise finances in discovery (which they absolutely hate to do), and Kroenke is starting to weasel on his promise, claiming he only promised to pay the lawyers, not any damages.

    Plus, not mentioned in this article, there’s concern on the NFL side about what a former NFL owner might testify to if this lawsuit actually goes to trial in January. Jerry Richardson used to own the Carolina Panthers, but the other owners forced him to sell after a sexual harassment scandal.

    Probably didn’t help Kroenke’s financial outlook that after privately financing the $5 billion SoFi stadium, he didn’t get to sell tickets the first year because of the pandemic.

    1236 chars

  38. Deborah said on November 19, 2021 at 3:43 pm

    Call me naive but I thought Rittenhouse would be convicted. I don’t know why. Now we know it’s open season on protesting progressives, no matter how peaceful, they’ll say it’s self defense or some other nonsense. There will be blood.

    233 chars

  39. David C said on November 19, 2021 at 5:46 pm

    The little psychopath will end up in prison for something. I just hope nobody gets hurt in the process.

    103 chars

  40. Jeff Gill said on November 19, 2021 at 6:02 pm

    Ah, no: WANE is owned by Nexstar Media Group. Which is also NewsNation which I don’t understand but to be fair haven’t watched.

    127 chars

  41. beb said on November 20, 2021 at 2:32 am

    I nearly, sort-of, almost saw the president on Wednesday. I was driving west on I-94, which is a freeway that runs east-west through the middle of the town. The airport is west of the city next to I-94. After weaving through multiple bridge replacements I was nearing I-75 when I noticed cop cars on either side of an overpass. The one right in front of the GM Poletown plant. Then I saw cop cars blocking the next overpass, and the one after that… It was about 2:30PM and I thought to myself this must be for Biden’s visit to the Poletown plant. Anyway,, for the next 5-10 miles EVERY overpass was blocked by cop cars, and there are a lot of overpasses along that section of I-94. Finally I see a bunch of flashing lights on the freeway. Must have been 20 cop cars leading a procession of dozens of SUVs, an ambulance, a large dark truck that was made a bomb truck and finally more cop cars bringing up the rear. It seemed like they had requisitioned every police vehicle in Michigan to protect the President.

    And that was my close encounter with greatness.

    1065 chars

  42. Deborah said on November 20, 2021 at 7:08 am

    We’re in a Lyft on our way to MDW which for some reason is costing $90! It has never cost more than $30 before???

    115 chars

  43. alex said on November 20, 2021 at 8:29 am

    Jeff, on the local news they’re always hyping News Nation and running ads for it, but I’ve never seen it either. We don’t have cable. It’s supposed to be a rechristened WGN America and the ads for it seem to reek a bit of right-wingness and they boast that you won’t find balanced news anywhere else. I think they’re trying to position it as what Fox used to be before it went full Pravda. Nexstar is a big conglomerate that includes the former Tribune Media, so there you go.

    476 chars

  44. FDChief said on November 20, 2021 at 7:25 pm

    Rittenhouse jury to every future non-Trumpkin protestor: get strapped or get stripped, baby.

    I wonder who on my Antifa local (Portland #112?) I need to contact to volunteer as an overwatch sniper for the next protest..?

    222 chars

  45. Dexter Friend said on November 20, 2021 at 9:24 pm

    beb…it’s quite a showing, isn’t it. I saw just one USA President, and I saw him 3 times. One might have been a double, a stooge stand-in…that was in 1975 at the kick-off to the 1976 Bi-Centennial at The Mall in D.C., when the presidential helicopter flew low over the multitude (the entire Mall was packed with people awaiting the gaw-damndest fireworks anyone ever had seen) and a President or a stooge waved out the open door. He was clearly visible but I sort of never thought it was Gerald Ford. However, I took the kids to the Fort Wayne War Memorial Coliseum to see Ford’s campaign appearance , so they could say they saw a President. The concourse had many men as sentries with those old earpieces stuck into their heads.
    Years later, in Ford’s dotage, he was paraded around the edges of the field at an M football game in Ann Arbor, sitting high up in a parade Cadillac, just looking like a king. Gerald Ford was captain of the Wolverine footballers in 1935.

    979 chars

  46. Dexter Friend said on November 20, 2021 at 9:29 pm

    All these years I was a chump for falling for bad information; now, thanks to dull old man right here on this blog, I no longer will have to appear as a chump. STADIA. Why the fuck did everybody let me go on like a goddam moron with the stadii gimmick, just laughing at me? Ha!
    Thanks dull old man.

    301 chars

  47. Deborah said on November 20, 2021 at 9:54 pm

    Why don’t we do what Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Gandhi and others said and keep the protests nonviolent. Don’t give the opposition an excuse to say self defense. They’ll try and they’ll get away with it some of the time but call me naive, I don’t think that will last.

    283 chars

  48. Sherri said on November 21, 2021 at 12:21 am

    The civil rights protests of the sixties were not non-violent. Protestors were beaten, had dogs set on them, fire hoses turned on them, and yes, were murdered. That the protestors weren’t violent did not protect them from violence being perpetrated on them.

    259 chars

  49. Sherri said on November 21, 2021 at 2:06 am

    I’m dealing with a board member who says he agrees with and supports the changes I’m trying to make to the board culture, at least in the abstract. Yet everything I actually do to change the way we do things on the board, there’s just something he has a problem with. He does the same thing to our black woman ED. We’ve both had meetings with him pointing out this particular pattern and how it impacts our ability to do our jobs, and he says he gets it, but he doesn’t change.

    My husband pointed out that sufficient cluelessness at some point is simply indistinguishable from malice. I don’t think he intends in any way to attack us, but the effect is as exhausting and frustrating as if he were.

    713 chars

  50. David C said on November 21, 2021 at 5:47 am

    Jerry Ford was supposed to speak at our Cub Scout banquet when he was our congress critter but he couldn’t make it because of congressional commitments or golf or something. He sent Betty instead. That’s an upgrade.

    215 chars

  51. Jeff Gill said on November 21, 2021 at 7:08 am

    And Sherri, it only takes two of them in a church’s leadership to freeze everything in amber, and there’s never less than two. Something about boards & committees & institutions attracts that mindset. I’ve had the same conversation you describe, a very sincere seeming “I see what you are trying to do and I support you” but in the actual meetings, it’s always the constitution or bylaws say this, or past board action says that, or Robert’s Rules require . . . and everything stops.

    I explained to the last board moderator I served under that the biggest problem was that our structure functioned so that no matter how many yes-es I could muster, one “no” could always stifle any new idea, but the proceduralists could always use one or two yes-es to push forward inertial and rigidly repetitious actions in the face of a raft of concern, let alone opposition. So we always ended up doing what we’d always done, because back before the 70s it worked so well.

    970 chars

  52. Suzanne said on November 21, 2021 at 11:35 am

    I am in a small women’s club which used to be associated with the Purdue Extension but isn’t any more. We have by-laws and boy oh boy, to do something contrary to the by-laws means you have to convince 2 of the members that it’s ok. “But the by-laws!” It’s a group that we are in voluntarily, we do it for ourselves, and we wrote and can rewrite or circumvent the rules as needed, but the 2 women always object. “But the by-laws!”
    There is always a few in any group, I am convinced, who can’t see the big picture no matter how well meaning they are.

    568 chars

  53. Sherri said on November 21, 2021 at 12:39 pm

    Now make those two lawyers, and welcome to my world. My superpower is that I’ve learned not to worry about making people like that mad at me, and that Robert’s Rules are actually much more flexible than most people realize.

    The most important change has already happened: we changed the by-laws to put in term limits. No more serving on the board for 20 or 30 years. Nine years is the max.

    397 chars

  54. Jeff Gill said on November 21, 2021 at 1:27 pm

    I’m preparing to step down as chair of our village BZBA, and am hesitating after fifteen years only because I fear one of those hyper-scrupulous passive aggressive meddlers jumping in to grab at the steering wheel . . . but I’ve been on too long for the civic good.

    265 chars

  55. basset said on November 21, 2021 at 2:43 pm

    Just been looking through some of the old posts made on this day in previous year’s. Ran into the Pioneer Woman’s turkey brining recipe and was surprised to see her say not to brine a previously frozen turkey because it’s already been injected with salt water and brining will make it too salty.

    Haven’t heard that before or had any problems with brining a frozen bird, anyone have any thoughts on it?

    405 chars

  56. alex said on November 21, 2021 at 4:48 pm

    basset, I’ve brined frozen birds before and they were okay, but yeah I’ve been reading lately where you’re supposedly not supposed to do that.

    My partner’s office gave us a big frozen turkey; otherwise I would have gone ahead and brought a fresh one. I want to do the Washington Post’s recipe this year for a spatchcocked turkey with tarragon herb butter. I figured I’d skip the brining part and just do the herb butter. May have to skip that too — no effing tarragon in any of the damned stores. I suppose I can sub other herbs and hope for the best.

    Shopping today was a madhouse. And even with multiple stops I couldn’t get everything on my list.

    657 chars

  57. David C said on November 21, 2021 at 5:17 pm

    Wet brining a turkey was always a major pain. I’ve only done one turkey since I found out about dry brining and I must say it’s so much easier. We did it on a fresh turkey so I can’t say how it would work on a frozen bird. I’ve dry brined other meats since and I’ll probably never go back. Cover it with salt, bung it in the fridge, and wait. That’s pretty much all there is to it. No buckets, no mess.

    https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-dry-brine

    450 chars

  58. basset said on November 21, 2021 at 5:33 pm

    Sounds easy enough, that might be the way to go. Just read about steaming potatoes for mashing instead,of boiling em, gonna try that tonight, and we’re getting some venison honey maple breakfast sausage made, so this looks like the week for new dishes. Venison chorizo too, gonna make that myself.

    301 chars

  59. Deborah said on November 21, 2021 at 5:35 pm

    We went to Whole Foods yesterday in Santa Fe and I noticed some shelf shortages for various items. This could mostly be due to the fact that it was the Saturday before Thanksgiving or it could be part of the problem with supply chains gearing back up during/after the pandemic. I had not seen any shortages in Chicago even though I had been reading about them. Most of the things I was looking for were obscure, for instance I was looking for lemon curd that I mix in with yogurt for breakfast, I used to be able to find a couple of different brands at the Santa Fe Whole Foods during the summer but yesterday they had nothing. Of course this isn’t the end of the world, I can use honey instead, or raspberry jam. I’m not seeing shortages of milk or eggs or ground beef or anything like that, but just a difference from Chicago. Some of the other items I was looking for were less obscure but not earth shattering. We went to Trader Joe’s today and had a similar experience, but then TJ’s has always been that way to me. You get hooked on a product they sell and then you can’t get it for a time. It’s frustrating but you get used to it.

    We are in the process of updating our Santa Fe condo bylaws with the lawyer we hired for the window replacement issues with the A-hole owner. It has been interesting. There will be future screaming fits from the A-hole I’m sure.

    1383 chars

  60. alex said on November 21, 2021 at 5:49 pm

    I think there must be supply chain issues. Some stores limit quantities of items to one or two per customer.

    And today I went on a wild goose chase trying to find Rice Krispies for my dad because he asked us to pick up a box. And not just any Rice Krispies, but the ones with… added… he couldn’t remember, but he wanted the ones with something else in them. There were exactly zero boxes of Rice Krispies at Kroger and likewise again at Meijer. So I called my dad and asked what his second choice would be. He wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted we would find it if we stopped at Walgreens. And we did, but it was just plain Rice Krispies, not with anything added. And in the only box on the shelf that wasn’t mangled practically beyond recognition. I didn’t even check the dates, but their food section looked like it mightn’t have been restocked in years.

    Anyway, so we drop by to give him his Rice Krispies and other groceries. And then he tells us it wasn’t Rice Krispies he wanted but Cheerios.

    1007 chars

  61. David C said on November 21, 2021 at 6:15 pm

    It sounds like some of the wild goose chases I went on when I was doing my grandfather’s shopping back in the day, Alex. The one I remember was him wanting some doughnuts that were six for 35 cents. This was a long time ago. They raised the price to 40 cents and when he looked at the cash register tape he tried to make me go back to the store and get the right ones. So, I feel for you. I don’t know how anyone could keep all the varieties of Cheerios straight. I figured from casual observation, because I don’t eat cereal anymore, that it was about a dozen. I just looked it up. It says there are at least 16. Most of them look like not so sneaky ways of packing sugar and what was once a pretty healthy thing.

    714 chars

  62. Sherri said on November 21, 2021 at 6:35 pm

    The biggest supply problem here is labor. Lots of stores limiting hours, and chains closing some locations temporarily because they don’t have enough people to staff them. I went to the grocery store the other evening at 7 pm, and all the checkout stands were closed and everyone had to use self-checkout because of staffing issues.

    334 chars

  63. Julie Robinson said on November 21, 2021 at 6:44 pm

    Oh man, Alex, I feel you. Sounds just like my mom, who, by the way, announced this afternoon that she just plain doesn’t like people or being around them and never has. What do you say to that? I was flummoxed.

    We tried to buy everything last week but faced some empty shelves too. Must be a lot of big gatherings happening.

    I’ve never brined a turkey because of sodium concerns. We buy the fresh, natural, and ridiculously expensive ones instead, while the sodium people sit there eating chips. Ahem.

    508 chars

  64. LAMary said on November 21, 2021 at 9:09 pm

    Alex I’ve spatchcocked turkey and chicken lots of times. Thyme works well. So does rosemary. Even cilantro.I can never find tarragon in the stores. Can’t even get tarragon p!ants in the spring.

    193 chars